March 09, 2009 -- St. Charles, IL – Traill County, North Dakota, has enlisted the professional GIS services of The Sidwell Company to aid its local assessment officials in the task of efficiently calculating soils valuations for agricultural parcels to meet new state-mandated agricultural assessment standards. Sidwell will provide the jurisdiction with agricultural parcel file development services by creating a digital GIS parcel file for all of the county’s agricultural parcels, to be used in conjunction with the soils map layer, to support soils computations using the Farmland Assessment and Report Management System (FARMS™)—an ArcGIS®-compliant software solution for agricultural tax assessments. Also, a customized enhancement to Sidwell’s FARMS™ module will be developed, which allows Traill County users to incorporate, if they choose, a distinct modifier layer (in addition to parcel, soils and land-use layers) that is unique to North Dakota farmland assessment.

Additionally, Sidwell will provide on-site, specialized training that focuses on the use of the FARMS™ software extension within ArcGIS® 9.3, covering basic operations for processing agricultural parcels, all processing and reporting tools in the system, and user customizations within the reporting application. Implementation of this project in Traill County also includes the installation and configuration of the FARMS™ solution for continued use and successful maintenance of the agricultural database.

Sidwell has previously contracted with and provided similar agricultural parcel file development and FARMS™ installation and training services to the North Dakota counties of Eddy, Foster, Kidder, Ramsey and Towner.

About Sidwell
The Sidwell Company is an employee-owned firm providing integrated land records management solutions and GIS mapping and software development to local government and private-sector entities across the country. Sidwell’s FARMS™ solution, currently used by over 140 customers nationwide, is a mature, robust GIS-based application developed and designed by the company for use in the creation, analysis and reporting of datasets related to agricultural real estate assessment. Sidwell also offers in-house aerial photography and photogrammetric services, and is the Midwest Distributor for Magellan™ GPS products and solutions. For more information about FARMS, Parcel Builder™ (a premier parcel mapping solution), Magellan, and Sidwell’s numerous other land record management and GIS solutions, call 877.SIDWELL (877.743.9355) or visit
www.sidwellco.com.

About ESRI
ESRI and ArcGIS 9.3 are licensed trademarks of ESRI. For more information about GIS industry leader ESRI, contact the company at 800.GIS.XPRT (800.447.9778) or visit them on the web at
www.esri.com.